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A Quick Test Of OpenGL In Mac OS X 10.6.5

11-12-2010, 05:50 PM

Phoronix: A Quick Test Of OpenGL In Mac OS X 10.6.5

In August we reviewed Apple's Enhanced OpenGL Stack that was introduced as an update to Mac OS X 10.6.4. This Snow Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 came out following Valve bringing Steam and its games to Mac OS X and collaboration via Apple, NVIDIA, and ATI/AMD to better the Mac OS X graphics stack with supporting new OpenGL extensions and making other optimizations, such as adding OpenGL occlusion queries support. While we tested this major Apple graphics update under a NVIDIA MCP79-based Mac Mini, which is a GPU that did not receive as many performance optimizations as those higher-end NVIDIA ASICs in newer Macs, the performance improvements were noticeable in some cases. In select games, however, Ubuntu Linux with NVIDIA's proprietary driver was still faster than Mac OS X 10.6.4 + SLGU. With Apple having released Mac OS X 10.6.5 this week that "addresses stability and performance of graphics applications and games," among other changes, we have carried out some new Mac OS X benchmarks seeing how the performance has changed, if at all.

the non monotonically decreasing graphics performance leads me to believe that the graphics optimizations were more nuanced than a simple performance upgrade. All mac hardware is not equil. Try it with the laptop hardware. Thats the sweetspot in their performance hardware. The Mac Pro line is just gravy

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Great to see the comparisons between Linux and MacOSX, on OpenGL technology which is a better OS comparison reference than gaming in Windows, where DirectX is a different factor altogether. Keep up the good job!

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These graphs must be wrong! Apple is perfect and flawless and if they say the performance has increased, it has. You can't capture this magical increase with the non-magical phoronix-test-suite. It's that simple!
[/sarcasm]

I wonder if Mac OS will stay in version 10 for the next 20 years, like X.org.

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I love Apple for their (fabricated?) passion and genius solutions to problems one wouldn't even think of as problems, but other than that the OS sucks, their hardware falls apart like Dell computers used to back in the days (a Dell today beats an Apple computer in robustness).

It just sucks... And is waaaaayyyy too expensive for what you get in return... But I love the WWDC videos.